When JSON decoding is hard this is not a minor thing when looking at my RESTful APIs. This is a major trade off. How to deal with it ideally?
In Elm, decoding is not nearly as easy as it is in JS because every field must be explicitly converted to an Elm value. Depending on the complexity of your conversion from JSON to Elm value (e.g. whether you are just decoding to primitive values or to custom types defined in your program), there may also be a bit of a learning curve.
As I stated in the post, there is a benefit in doing all of this: your Elm application will effectively type-check your JSON and reject it if it is malformed.
I'm not making a joke but this is a valid point. And if it had ELMON (Elm object notation), things would be more straight forward.
- json-to-elm http://json2elm.com - swagger-elm https://github.com/ahultgren/swagger-elm/ - elm-graphql https://github.com/jahewson/elm-graphql, https://github.com/jamesmacaulay/elm-graphql - elm-export https://hackage.haskell.org/package/elm-export
It's worth noting that JSON decoding is not _hard_ as such, but it's harder than other parts of the language. It is more time consuming. Tools like these can help reduce the amount of time you spend hand writing decoders.